Burlington among 25 most affordable college towns in US

Vermont Business Magazine College is an exciting time full of new faces, newfound freedom, and new expenses. While it’s important to find a campus that gels with your personality, it’s no secret a city’s living cost—and a school’s tuition—can end up making your decision for you. Between rent, utilities, and groceries, a weekly $4.50 trip to Starbucks can push your monthly student budget over the limit. Lucky for you, Move.org got its hands dirty and dug up the 25 most affordable college towns to help you vet your options and Burlington came in at 13.

Get ahead of your Top Ramen days and see which states you could afford to live in (and which would allow your budget the occasional caramel macchiato).

Move.org analyzed the most affordable college towns (SEE LIST BELOW) by first looking into college towns with populations of more than 15,000 people. From there, Move looked at which towns had a large following and then made sure there was at least one to five colleges in each town.

Of the cities on the list, Move broke down each one’s cost of living by three groups:

• Living (60%) - Living expenses had the greatest pull in determining how expensive it is to live in each town. To determine this, we averaged the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in a city center, the average cost of utilities (electricity, heating, cooling, water, and garbage), and the minimum wage. In cities where the minimum wage varied, we based it on the wage of a large company (over fifteen employees) that doesn’t offer health care benefits.

• Travel (30%) - To calculate how much it would cost to get to the town, we averaged out the price of a one-way train ticket and a gallon of gas.

• Entertainment (10%) - Because nightlife and recreational activities are an important factor to consider when moving somewhere—especially for college students—we looked at the cost of both a movie ticket and a domestic beer.

Move Ranking Criteria

To get the rankings, Move considered everything college students have to budget for, as well as things college students usually end up choosing to spend their spare change on too.

From happy hour to rent, Move figured out how much it would cost to live in each city by crunching the numbers of seven different factors:

• City population

• Median rent of a one-bedroom apartment in the city center

• Average cost of utilities

• Cost of transportation, calculated by the cost of one-way train ticket and a gallon of gas

• Price of a movie ticket

• Minimum wage

• Cost of a 0.5-liter bottle of domestic beer

In addition to the factors above, Move also included the price of tuition for the schools in each town based on a twelve credit-hour workload—since the cost of a class schedule and textbooks can mean the difference between sharing a four-person bedroom and having one of your own.